In a sign of the changing social networking landscape, the once market-leader and pioneering site Myspace has announced a significant reduction in its workforce by nearly 50%. The Wall Street Journal reports that Myspace has cut 500 of its more than 1,000 employees worldwide, as the site struggles to remain profitable in the shadow of Facebook.

Myspace notified staff of the cuts on Tuesday, as parent company News Corp. considers ways to make the social networking site more popular again. A recent relaunch positioned Myspace as an entertainment destination, to build on its traditional strengths as a music focused site, and the company claims that this has led to increased sign-ups and also stronger mobile usage.

However, since News Corp bought Myspace for $580 million in 2005 it has been overtaken in recent years by the rapid growth in Facebook usage, which has grown to more than 500 million members while Myspace's numbers have dwindled.

The micro-blogging website Twitter is ending the year with a new round of funding, having raised $200m against a valuation of $3.7 billion. According to All Things Digital, the funding included the addition of 2 new board members and is a significant development for Twitter as it continues to upgrade its management and business model.

This new input of funding will help support Twitter's expansion plans and also indicates to bigger companies (such as Google) that it's not for sale!

In another article from Paid Content, which also reports on the Twitter funding, there is a summary of the main venture capital funding for online companies in 2010, including Yelp, LivingSocial and Groupon (which recently rejected a takeover bid from Google).

The Media Post website has revealed the results from a new comScore survey for August that shows Facebook gaining top position amongst major sites in terms of time spent, with a total of 41.1 billion minutes, with Google second with 39.8 billion minutes. Yahoo dropped to third, with 37.7 billion and this portal / search engine also saw its share of time spent in the third quarter drop to an all-time low of 9.3%.

The comScore report also says that Google's number of global users passed 1 billion for the first time last month, although Yahoo reportedly edged out Google to become the top site in monthly traffic, with 179 million unique visitors. Google had 178.8 million, followed by Microsoft with 165.3 million.

Facebook remained the fourth-ranked site, at 148 million, which was up from 145.5 million recorded in July. These figures of rising traffic combined with increasing time spent on the site bodes well for Facebook's efforts to monetize its vast inventory and user base.

Facebook has said it is adding new metrics to help advertisers measure the social context of ads by tracking the proportion that include endorsements from friends on the social network. That means telling advertisers what percentage of their ads people "Liked" or used to engage with a Facebook Page, event or application. Research company Nielsen reported earlier this year that people are 68% more likely to remember an ad and twice as likely to remember what it said when they see a friend has interacted with the ad on Facebook.

In a separate article by The New Yorker, a detailed profile on Facebook's co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg provides a fascinating insight into his background and the rise of this social networking phenomenon, in advance of a new Hollywood film that is soon to be released about the early days of the company.

How well is your business embracing social networking tools and what are the potential opportunities for companies to access the wide user base and active participants on many of the core services. We've recently developed some factsheets on the 3 main services - Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, so if you'd like to receive a copy of these, please contact us.

Social media marketing won't work for all companies, but it is an area that should be explored and the basic structures put into place. We've been running a Twitter account for over a year now, as a source of news and communication with our 'followers'. We've also developed our company pages on LinkedIn and Facebook for Web Marketing Workshop, and our subsidiary companies Web Search Workshop and Web Training Workshop.

Please take a look and follow our pages if you wish, to see how we'll be developing these services over the coming months. And if you'd like to discuss the opportunities for your business in more detail, please let us know.

There has been widespread coverage in the press and on blogs and Twitter over the past week regarding the launch of Facebook Places. In response to the growing trend in location services, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, Facebook has now entered the fray and is offering a new service to their millions of users (although initially this is just working in the US).

This article from Advertising Age gives a good summary of the new service and how this can be used as a potential marketing tool. However, as always happens with Facebook services, there are also considerable concerns about the privacy settings with the new Places tool, and how friends can also log your location, without your knowledge - as described in this second piece.

The new Facebook Places services certainly adds another resource to the options available from the social networking site, but how it will be used by users and the benefits to marketers remains unclear at the moment.

Another major milestone has been reached by Facebook, the social networking giant. As covered by many global media sites, including the BBC, Facebook has announced that it has now registered its 500 millionth member. In addition, the site has also gained around 100 million new users in the last six months.

As the site continues to expand around the world, largely through word of mouth, the rapid increase in users is expected to reach the next milestones of 750m users, and then 1 billion, in the next few years. Despite recent concerns about privacy on the site, it is clear that many people are not deterred and are either testing the site for themselves or becoming active users.

The Twitter blog has announced a new feature for the micro-blogging site, with the launch of Twitter Places. This now allows users to tag their 'tweets' with specific place locations, so that readers can see where the tweet was made.

Users can also click a Twitter Place within a tweet to see other recent tweets posted from a particular location. There is also integration with the Foursquare and Gowalla services, which are increasingly popular location-based services, plus an API to allow developers to integrate Twitter Places into their applications.

An article by PC World looks at the use of Twitter's search tool to promote websites and brands.

At the very basic level, the micro-blogging site can be used to search for mentions of a company name or brand, and then following those users or responding to them directly in an appropriate manner. However, smart marketers are also using Twitter to search for more generic words or phrases to find potential customers and then contacting them with valuable information or offers that might be of interest.

Twitter users tend to be more responsive to this type of approach, although if the practice becomes more widespread or abused, that particular channel could be closed. There are also new services appearing that try to automate this process, such as Replyz, which the article says aims to make it easy for marketers to find relevant questions that Twitter users are asking.

Marketers can also use Twitter APIs (application programming interfaces) to create tailored tools to monitor Twitter queries and automatically send direct responses to people, or to constantly monitors trending topics, looking for matches with keywords important to a company.

An article on the Forbes website says that Facebook, the largest social networking tool in the world, is dominated by women.

Using data from a number of recent surveys and advertising tools, the report says that the 400-million member site is 57% female and attracts 46 million more female visitors than male visitors each month. Women are more active on Facebook, having 8% more friends and participating in 62% of the sharing activity. Women are also seen as the majority of users on many of the other large social networking sites, such as Twitter, MySpace and Flickr. In contrast, men are most active on sites like Digg, YouTube and LinkedIn, which are more content-oriented and promotional than discussion-based.

The article explains how data shows that women don't just visit different sites from men, they also use social media differently than men. While women often use online social networking tools to make connections and share items from their personal lives, men use them as means to gather information and increase their status.

MediaPost reports that Twitter is planning to launch an advertising platform soon, possibly within the next month. This will be the first move towards 'monetizing' the huge volume of traffic that Twitter now generates, to create some revenue back to the business. The challenge facing Twitter is to do this in a way that won't alienate users and makes it clear that 'tweets' or tags have been sponsored or not.

This comes at a time when Twitter is now handling 50 million 'tweets' a day. The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the latest data provided by Twitter, which demonstrates the massive growth in the service, from users writing 5,000 "tweets" per day in 2007 to 300,000 per day in 2008 and 2.5 million per day in 2009. The latest figures represent a year-on-year growth of 1,400% in the short comments being posted each day, with the current levels averaging 600 tweets per second.

The Google blog has announced their acquisition of Aardvark, a 'social search engine' whereby users can login to ask questions and get responses from other users. Set up by ex-Google employees, Aardvark analyzes questions to determine what they're about and then matches each question to people with relevant knowledge and interests to give users an answer quickly (stated to be within 5 minutes), either by email or through instant messaging.

As with all Google's acquisitions, they tend to spot a good opportunity and a new service that could become more mainstream in the future. You can visit the Aardvark site here: http://vark.com/ask

A recent blog article from MediaPost examines the role that social media is starting to play by supporting existing forms of marketing, such as email marketing. It claims that social media is now a useful tool to help develop more targeted, relevant and successful email marketing campaigns, by extending the reach of these mailings using social sharing features. This means that recipients will share the content with friends who might be interested, which then helps to build brand awareness and potential develop the original email list with targeted contacts.

Social media is also seen as a valuable tool to build new email lists from scratch. Running promotions through Facebook or Twitter can create interest and involvement for future use, as long as the incentive relates to the long-term target market as well. As the article says, marketers will often attract prospects to their website and building email campaign lists through the use of promotions, but social media is unique because it "disarms prospects by building a connection with them in advance".

New research by Forrester claims that social marketing will become more strategic and planned in 2010 with companies taking tools such as Facebook and Twitter more seriously. As reported by Media Post News, the new research contains a list of social computing prediction for 2010 and suggests that companies who are taking this media seriously will create social councils - cross-functional teams aimed at sharing ideas about social media - and allocate budgets and planned structures for these groups.

It also suggests that an increasing number of companies will adopt 'listening platforms' to monitor social media, that Twitter will become more profitable or get acquired and also Facebook will take a more proactive approach to protecting members' privacy in the light of increasing demands from users.

In another report - the 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report from MarketingSherpa - the No. 1 objective targeted and measured by marketers was said to be an increase in website traffic, followed by an increase in lead generation, increase sales revenue, improved search engine ranking and improved brand or product reputation.

Social networking website Facebook has once again run into a backlash from changes being made to its privacy policy. As reported by the BBC, the new conditions were introduced earlier this week with a pop-up box asking members to review and select their privacy settings. However, like previous changes to privacy and usage conditions, the change is attracting a large amount of negative feedback.

Digital rights groups and bloggers have responded with criticism of Facebook's changing policy, claiming that these are unnecessary and encouraged users to share their updates with the wider online community, as well as making content available to search engines. However, Facebook has responded by saying the changes should help members to manage updates they wanted to share, not trick them into revealing too much.

This is not the first time that Facebook has received such a response to changes, which reflects the extent of membership and usage of the site around the world. However, although it might damage their reputation in the short term, it remains to be seen whether this backlash has a long-term affect on usage of the service.

Facebook began testing the latest privacy changes during 2009 before introducing them site-wide. The changes let users decide who should see their updates, whether all 350 million Facebook members should see them, and if they should be viewable across the web. A spokesman said the changes to privacy made it easier to tune the audience for an update or status change so default settings of openness should have less impact, although users still have the ultimate choice of what to place on their profiles or updates.

The Google blog has announced a new Social Search service, which will be available to Google account users who are logged in when they search Google. With this search option, Google finds relevant public content from a user's friends and contacts and highlights this at the bottom of the search results. Users can also filter their results to see only content from their social circle by clicking "Show options" on the results page and clicking "Social."

Google is collecting these search results from publicly available information on the web and by linking a user's Google profile to their wider social circle of friends and contacts using such sites as Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are then specific to each user and, if Gmail is also used, will display relevant content from 'chat buddies' and other contacts.

The ClickZ website has summarised new data released by The Nielsen Company which says that the time being spent on social networking sites has nearly tripled in the past year. In addition to this trend, the amount being spent on advertising on these sites has also increased at a similar rate.

According to the report, consumer activity on social networking and blogging sites comprised 17% of all time spent on the Internet in August 2009, up from just 6% a year ago. At the same time, advertising spend on these sites grew 119%, from an estimated US$49 million in August 2008 to US$108 million last month. As a percentage of total online ad spend in the US, these ad expenditures on social networking sites climbed from 7% to 15% year on year.

Not surprisingly, Facebook is the big winner from this growth, as recently reported, and as well as the number of users growing substantially, the time spent on the site has also increased, with the average user now spending 5 hours and 46 minutes per month on the site, up from 1 hour and 40 minutes a year ago. As a result, Facebook has reportedly seen a significant growth in ad impressions, accounting for a 14.7% share of US display advertising views last month, up from just 1.8% in January this year.

According to Nielsen, the spend by industry sector on the top social network sites has increased in all areas, with the entertainment industry showing the biggest annual increase, up by 812%, and travel advertising increasing spend by 364%.

The Wall Street Journal covers the latest announcement from Facebook that it has now reached 300 million users, another sign of the continued growth of this popular social networking site. This means that an extra 50 million users have been added since July, when the 250m mark was announced, so the upward growth curve continues at a rapid rate.

Of course all these users are not regular users of the site, but it still makes for an impressive user base of registered names, with 70% reported to be based outside of the US now. Facebook also claim to have moved into a positive cashflow situation now and are expected to earn more than US$500 million in revenue in 2009 - another significant growth in the past year, up more than 70% on the 2008 figure.

A report by Reuters says that around one of every five Internet display ads in the United States is now being viewed on a social networking website, such as MySpace and Facebook. The data comes from a new survey by comScore which demonstrates the increasing importance of social media sites and the broadening acceptance of such sites by brand advertisers, as well as the challenge now being faced by the more traditional online publishers, such as Yahoo and AOL.

The new report says that social media sites represented just over 21% of U.S. Internet display ads in July, with MySpace and Facebook accounting for more than 80% of those ads. However, the question will remain as to whether these sites can be used as effectively for advertising, due to the nature of their usage. Also, because the content on social media sites is created by users, some have questioned the willingness of marketers to place their brands alongside that content and the potential risks that could bring.

Facebook, the market-leading social networking site, has been forced to change its global privacy policy following negotiations with the privacy commissioner in Canada. A report by the BBC says that Facebook was recently found to breach Canadian law by holding on to users' personal data indefinitely and has therefore agreed to make changes to the way it handles this information and be more transparent about what data it collects and why.

The other main stumbling block that has been an issue for some time has been the inability for users to deactivate or delete their account, but this is now being changed so that it will be possible in the future. The decision could also have implications for other social networking websites.

As well as updating their privacy policy, Facebook has said it will make changes that will give users more control over the data they provide to third-party developers of applications, such as games and quizzes. These changes will require applications to state which information they wish to access and obtain consent from the user before it is used or shared.

The Wall Street Journal blog includes an article about the use of social networks in the workplace and how this growing issue needs to be addressed by companies in a clear manner. According to a recent survey in the US by Deloitte, a majority of business executives believe that they have a right to know what their employees are doing on social-networking sites. However, most workers - not surprisingly - say it’s none of their bosses’ business!

However, the margin was quite low, as only 53% of employee respondents said their social networking profiles are none of their employers’ business, which probably reflects the awareness of many that whatever they might think, these details are in the public domain and are likely to be viewed at some time. Regardless, 61% of employees said that they wouldn’t change what they were doing online even if their boss was monitoring their activities.

About a quarter of employees said they knew of specific guidelines as to what they could and couldn’t post on social networking sites and a similar proportion also said that their company didn’t have a policy, or that they didn’t know if their company had a policy.